4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

Many have proclaimed that the only misstep in Cristian Mungiuâ€™s searing, expertly paced Palme dâ€™or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is its deployment of one particularly in-your-face climactic image. The content of the shot shouldnâ€™t come as much of a surprise to those who know the subject matter of the film, yet most viewers Iâ€™ve spoken with have nevertheless deemed it an intentional â€śshock.â€ť While I certainly canâ€™t quibble with anyoneâ€™s gut reaction to Mungiuâ€™s decision to finally show and not tell, to me this image is integral not only to the filmâ€™s success but also to its nature. Mungiuâ€™s movie may not need more plaudits, yet it might need defending. What we have here is a film in which (with one notable narrative exception) we see all its protagonist sees, hear what she hears, swallow fear, intake images just as she does; that 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, ostensibly the story of an illegal abortion, is greatly privileged to the point of view of a young woman who helps her friend procure the abortion and not the pregnant girl herself illustrates just how trickily experiential the film is. In fact, despite the controversial, long, lingering close-up in question (which, in my opinion, allows the viewer to see what they donâ€™t want to see, as a means to getting over the dread associated with it and moving on), 4 Months is not really an â€śabortion movieâ€ť at all. Rather, itâ€™s unerringly fixated on matters of female self-preservation, survival, togetherness, and alienation.

This is all enacted in 1987 Romania, during the waning days of Nicolae Ceausescuâ€™s reign, and though the urgency of the breathless narrative might seem tenfold with that countryâ€™s economic collapse and essential police state as a backdrop, 4 Months â€™ narrative often feels more universal than site specific. Even without a basic knowledge of Romaniaâ€™s political and financial instability of the period and Ceausescuâ€™s specific social dictates (in 1966, the Communist leader overturned a nine-year-old ruling legalizing abortion, partly to increase birth rate in the country), one would find the central dilemma of 4 Months, and its attendant aesthetic (bruising, tactile), nothing if not instantly identifiable, even relatable. The clandestine nature of abortion, legalized or not, may be what fuels the narrative of the film, yet itâ€™s the human nature of the women navigating this world that spiritualizes it. 4 Months is more concerned with the plight of women forced to societyâ€™s fringes than the minute details of abortion in late-Eighties Romania.

It also simply further proves, alongside the rest of the filmâ€™s bravura compositions, that Mungiu has an innate sense for the cameraâ€”not as thoroughly fixed on his protagonistâ€™s point of view as the Dardennes tend to be, but remaining close enough to Otilia that many have invited comparisons between his aesthetic and that of the brilliant Belgian brothers, Mungiu always finds the perfect way to frame his images and express his ideas visually. Whether ensconced in grim realism or, at times, bathed in almost noirish shadow, 4 Months displays a true film artist at work. This is especially encouraging for anyone following the sudden ascension of Romania to the forefront of world cinema. After Cristi Puiuâ€™s wildly hailed descent into the madness of contemporary Romanian health care, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (ranked number one on indieWIREâ€™s wide-ranging criticsâ€™ poll for 2006) and Corneliu Porumboiuâ€™s elegantly funny, minimalist political exegesis on the 1989 revolution and overthrow of Ceausescu, 12:08 East of Bucharest, 4 Months comes across as the most accessible. Mungiuâ€™s instincts are on-target nearly scene for scene, but its aesthetic is not as rigorous (read: alienating, for some) as those in the other two; focused on character, motivation, and universal notions of marginalized sisterhood, 4 Months could bring the Romanian new wave a lot closer to mainstream art-house acceptance.

Like Lazarescu, 4 Months takes the form of a procedural, a long dayâ€™s journey into an ever-spreading darkness of night in which the establishment allows life to slowly slip away. Yet unlike Mr. Lazarescu, who loses his humanity bit by bit until heâ€™s nothing more than flesh (or, depending on your take, a transcendent body), Otilia, and to a lesser extent Gabita, only grow in stature as the film continues, right up to its dramatically abrupt black-out. Despite Mungiuâ€™s purposeful attempts to capture them uncomfortably within the frame, and despite a series of dreadful occurrences in which they are violated by a succession of looming male figures, itâ€™s difficult to think of them as mere victims. Trapped in a social structure that despises them, and especially their bodies, these two women remain, finally, dignified.